Happy hour now cocktail, beer rich

Mixology has come a long way in Victoria and some beers fall into a class all their own

Cocktail Culture: Recipes & Techniques From Behind the Bar

Cocktail Culture: Recipes & Techniques From Behind the Bar

by Shawn Soole & Nate Caudle

Touchwood Editions

Long considered the craft beer capital of British Columbia, Victoria has earned a name for itself as a cocktail town in recent years. This is thanks to a bevy of talented bartenders working at various bars and restaurants who have embraced the art of the cocktail as a collective: teaching and learning from each other, experimenting, throwing caution to the wind, and, ultimately, mixing some great drinks — and getting noticed because of it. Proof positive is the success of the city’s annual Art of the Cocktail festival, which began as a fundraiser for the Victoria Film Festival in 2008 and has since grown into a prominent three-day event.

Cocktail Culture tells the story of Victoria’s mixology scene by profiling the city’s best bartenders, their unique recipes, and the places where they sling drinks, all filtered through the voices of Shawn Soole and Nate Caudle, two of the city’s best known cocktail creators. Soole and Caudle worked together at Clive’s Classic Lounge, which was named one of the top 10 best cocktail bars in the world at the 2011 Taste of the Cocktail Spirited Awards, before opening their own place, Little Jumbo, earlier this year.

As the prominent globe-trotting cocktail consultant Philip Duff writes in the foreword to the book, “at Little Jumbo they have created the hub, the incubator, the petri dish in which Victoria’s passion for cocktails has multiplied wildly to infect local bars and liquor stores, private homes, and public events.” Duff’s enthusiastic praise is not overstated; since moving to Victoria from Vancouver last year, I have definitely noticed how popular cocktails are here, and how prominent this book’s authors are in that scene.

Caudle and Soole do not spend much time writing about the city’s cocktail culture in this book, but rather let it speak for itself through the recipes and techniques they share, as well as the profiles of bartenders and the places to sample their wares.

There are dozens of cocktail recipes for those who do want to try them at home. Many are twists on a well-known classic, such as the Saskatoon Julep, which hails back to Caudle’s hometown, while others are completely off the wall. The “Cold Night In,” for example, which was the drink that earned Shawn Soole a write-up in The New York Times, features rum flavoured by, wait for it, grilled cheese sandwiches.

Though smaller than a typical coffee table topper, Cocktail Culture will definitely look good in your living room. It is filled with beautiful photography of dazzling drinks — and beautiful bartenders.

Invite your friends over to try out one or two of these recipes, and while you are slaving in the kitchen, trying to get that lemon peel to curl just so, your guests can skip through its pages, admiring the pictures and pausing here and there to learn a bit more about Victoria’s cocktail culture.

The Brew-tal Truth Guide to Ext-reme Beers

by Adem Tepedelen

Lyons Press

The stereotypical view of beer is the polar opposite of the cocktail. Beer has long been seen as unsophisticated and mundane, better suited to chugging in great quantity than sipping and savouring, but that perception has largely disappeared thanks to the huge growth of the craft beer industry in North America and around the world. Here in British Columbia, the industry has tripled in size since 2006; now, nearly 20 per cent of the beer consumed here is produced by B.C. craft breweries.

Craft beer consumers are especially attracted to the wide variety of styles: pale ales and Pilsners, porters and stouts, saisons and steam beers, IPAs and ESBs, barrel-aged barley wines and Belgian sours. Many of these beers are sophisticated and delicate, exhibiting refined flavours that pair well with a wide variety of foods, perhaps even more so than wine.

That said, there are also many “extreme” craft beer styles that disavow subtlety and embrace bold flavours, audacious experimentation and high alcohol levels. Craft brewers continually push the envelope, melding beer styles into hybrids or amplifying existing beers into bolder variations — and many beer lovers have followed them to these new frontiers of flavour and potency. The IPA we all thought was unbelievably hoppy five years ago might be labelled a dry-hopped pale ale now, and Double IPAs topping nine per cent ABV are increasingly mainstream. Imperial stouts with alcohol levels in the teens, rivalling wine, are popular seasonal brews that many beer geeks put away in their cellars to mellow for years. Gone are the “Great Taste ... Less Filling!” days of Miller Lite with its bland flavour and minuscule alcohol level.

Catering to the extreme crowd, Victoria-based beer writer Adem Tepedelen began writing a column called “Brewtal Truth” in 2009 for Decibel, an American music magazine for the extreme metal scene. Tepedelen, an American himself, has now spun that column into this book, “an all-excess pass to brewing’s outer limits” that is ideal for fans of both extreme music and beer.

“Welcome, thrillseekers!” is how Tepedelen aptly begins the book. Indeed, this book is ideal for beer lovers who enjoy extreme styles, especially those who also listen to metal. It includes interviews with some prominent musicians and brewers, including Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head Brewery), Mikkel Borg Bjergsø (Mikkeller Brewery), and Greg Koch (Stone Brewing). The author even pairs beers with specific songs.

Don’t expect to find a lot of references to Canada or British Columbia here — Tepedelen does sneak a few Canadian beers in, and one even makes it on to the cover (Driftwood Brewery’s Son of the Morning) — but many of the extreme beers he describes are available in liquor stores north of the border, so readers can compare the effects on their palates (and livers) with the author’s descriptions.

Author Joe Wiebe’s book Craft Beer Revolution was a B.C. bestseller for 2013.

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